With the development of faster and more powerful processors in many electronic devices power consumption has become an issue of increasing importance, in particular with regard to mobile electronic devices with limited power sources. Mobile devices such as, but not limited to, mobile telephones, personal data appliances, personal digital assistants (PDAs), lap top computers and the like, are sometimes required to operate for long periods of time before their power source can be recharged.
Power consumption of a mobile station is determined by the amount of energy used to transmit data, such as audio data, over an uplink to a base station (BS), as well as receive data from the base station over a downlink.
In transmission, data is grouped in blocks with each block being transmitted over a number of radio bursts. During a voice call on a mobile telephone the amount of power consumed depends on the amount of power needed to transmit audio data blocks on the uplink to the base station BS such that the base station correctly receives the information sent by the mobile telephone. The amount of power used to transmit the information over the uplink is configured by the base station with the Power Control Level (PCL) value, the channel coding parameters, modulation and source coding parameters. The total amount of transmission energy is dependent on the consumption of each component of the mobile to transmit the information and the amount of power per burst and the duration of each audio block encoded in frames. One block is encoded on S bursts and the amount of power is directly proportional to S*PCL.
In reception power consumption of a mobile station in communication with a base station will depend on the period of time during which the radio frequency sub-system of the mobile telephone phone is open to receive an audio block on the downlink and the operating parameters of the receiver. One audio block is encoded on S bursts.
Consequently an important issue for the manufacturer of a mobile station is to reduce as much as possible the power needed to transmit audio data while still enabling the BS station to decode the audio data and to reduce the time window for decoding audio blocks sent by the BS.